Freely improvised and non-academic electroacoustic music {as}[by] urban folk[s] ~ part 2
from: Emergence at the frontiers and in fringes & trenches of contemporary music
In an earlier paper in our series of speculative writings on the frontiers, fringes and trenches of contemporary music (published in 2009, in Hungarian [HSEF]) you will find a somewhat unorthodox but in a number of contexts quite workable definition of the socio-musical activity the roots of which above we traced back to the the fictional Scope of the year 1966. Since its -imaginary- launch there, the number of practitioners in the field has been growing steadily, informally (self-)organising within a number of intersecting networks of varying sizes, locally and globally, that together continue to be responsible for the staging of a great many small-scale performances and the production of a vast number of audio recordings, mostly auto-distributed in small editions in divers formats, digital and/or analog (web, CD, CDrom, K7, vinyl). In [HSEF] we name the music thus practiced as electroacoustic improvisation (EAI), that we define there as “freely improvised music in which at least one among the ‘voices’ is brought forth by the use of other than a traditional (western or not) (acoustic and/or electrically amplified) musical instrument”.
The chaotically sprouting, splitting, expanding, sometimes retracting, networks that consume and produce TKOMTIUH, rhizome-like (mostly outside the reach of mainstream search- and spotlights and largely in what usually is named sub-culture, a ‘cultural underground’) intersect, to a big, to a small, to a larger, or to a smaller extent, in some instances for the better and sometimes for the worse, with genres identified by one or more among the continuing proliferation (starting in the early 1980s, and accompanied by an exponential increase in quantity, of musical activity and productivity worldwide) of terms ’n’ names ’n’ labels defined and invented, at times re-defined or re-invented and assigned by musicologists, media theorists, music journalists, critics, et cetera … to ‘musics’, that thus ad-hoc are divided into non-exclusice categories like (random sample, listed in no particular musical, technological, ideological or chronological/historical order) industrial music, noise, musique concrète, glitch, free improvisation, art pop, outsider music, post-punk, alternative, ambient, drone, ambient industrial, industrial rock…
